Navigating roundabouts and unprotected turns in autonomous driving

The development of a fully autonomous driving vehicle (AV) requires various traffic situations to be handled efficiently. One of the most common driving manoeuvres which an AV experiences in daily traffic is giving way (yielding) to other traffic participants. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient method of yielding that doesn’t query yielding areas of interests from map API making it hassle free to use without having to rely on digitized yielding areas. We incorporated our method into one of the well-known open-source autonomy stacks called Autoware. The proposed method makes use of high-definition (HD) map elements including lanes and stoplines for filtering vehicles which participate in yielding decision making. Our method estimates future collisions of filtered vehicles of interest with AV’s planned trajectory and outputs a binary yielding decision for ego vehicle. Our method covers different yielding areas including a roundabout and an unprotected turn. We tested and evaluated the decision making of our method on various simulated scenarios and afterwards successful real-world tests were conducted using an in-house AV. An in-depth analysis of our approach shows that the proposed yielding solution works reasonably well i.e. 87% successful yielding area navigation ratio on real data.